Monday, February 20. 2012

On windows I used to like the Windows Explorer as a file manager, at least in the shape it had with w2k. And there has been toy pack by Microsoft which, among other more or less useful add ons, allowed me to add an "send to clipboard" entry to the context menue of any file which would push the file's path into the clipboard and thus helped me to avoid typing it. I missed it ever since I changed to linux/KDE as my desktop environment. Yes, you can get the folder path but that's not all I wanted.

However I found hob to fix this and add such an entry to the dolphin file manaer's context menue, and it was easy, too.

The thing that needs to be added is called a ServiceMenu in KDE jargon, I let locate find me where those sort of files live on my system and it returned a number of them at /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/. I assume there are other folders you could put them , i.e. below ~/.kde/, but I was in a hurry and just got root to create /usr/share/kde4/services/ServiceMenus/sendPathToClipboard.desktop The name is not important as long as it is unique and ends in .desktop.

Save it, open dolphin, right click on some file and in the Actions submenu appears a new entry. With a fancy klipper icon athe the start of the line - I just guessed that part of the .desktop file and it worked immediately.